Press Releases

Companies are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) like it’s going out of style, according to a new report by Gartner. The Stamford firm’s 2019 CIO Survey of more than 3,000 executives in 89 countries found that AI implementation grew a whopping 270 percent in the past four years, and 37 percent in the last year alone. That’s up from 10 percent in 2015, which isn’t too surprising considering that by some estimates, the enterprise AI market will be worth $6.14 billion by 2022. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, in fact, labor market shifts will result in a 1.2 percent increase in gross domestic product growth (GDP) for the next ten years and help capture an additional 20 to 25 percent in net economic benefits — $13 trillion globally — in the next 12 years. “We still remain far from general AI that can wholly take over complex tasks, but we have now entered the realm of AI-augmented work and decision science — what we call … [Read more...] about Gartner: Enterprise use of AI grew 270% over the past 4 years

Churn — that all-important measure of attrition — is often challenging to predict when it comes to mobile games. There’s two types of churn — churn at the micro level, between an app and a specific user, and at the macro level, between an app and all its users — and they influence each other unintuitively. That’s problematic for publishers and developers alike, considering the cash at stake — $70.3 billion in revenue was generated by mobile games in 2018, according to Newzoom’s recent Global Games Market Report, which is expected to climb to $106.3 billion in 2021. A new method promises to elucidate things, though, in part with the help of machine learning. It’s described in a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org (“Micro- and Macro-Level Churn Analysis of Large-Scale Mobile Games“), which was coauthored by a team of researchers hailing from Samsung Research America, Texas A&M University, University … [Read more...] about Researchers use Samsung data and AI to predict mobile game churn

Dmitry Polischuk had an almost unnerving nonchalance about him as our sleek ride — a Toyota Prius V — bobbed in and out of traffic on its own. The steering wheel, as if guided by unseen forces, navigated the hatchback smoothly around the perimeter of the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas, where we’d met in the midst of the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show. Polischuk and I sat in the back; an engineer rode shotgun. The driver’s seat was up for grabs. This was Yandex’s self-driving car — the one it’s been testing publicly in Russia since August 2018 as part of Europe’s first autonomous ride-hailing service. Its debut comes roughly a year after Yandex revealed its first prototype and kicked off pilot programs in Moscow, Innopolis, and Skolkovo, and less than a month after the Russian company announced that Israel’s Ministry of Transport had granted it permission to operate driverless cars on the country’s roads. To date, Yandex … [Read more...] about Yandex let us ride in its autonomous Prius

Chronic diseases affect the lives of millions of people around the world. Over 16 million adults in the U.S., for instance, have been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), an inflammation of the lungs which obstructs airflow, and researchers estimate that 80 percent of Americans will experience back pain several times in their lives. Making matters worse, the treatments tend to be expensive — in 2010, the total annual cost of COPD and back pain in the U.S. was projected to be $50 billion and $240 billion, respectively. Kaia Health, a four-year-old firm founded by former Foodora CEO Konstantin Mehl and New York internist Innocent Clement, claims its digital therapeutics solution — apps that tap artificial intelligence (AI) and motion-tracking technology to help manage pain — is not only cheaper than prescription drugs and in-person consultations, but more sustainable in the long term. Kaia has empirical evidence on its side: In a … [Read more...] about Kaia Health raises $10 million to treat chronic pain with AI

Wilderness trail traversal is a useful skill for rescuers and outdoor enthusiasts alike, but one that’s difficult to teach to robots. It’s not that the mechanical beasts aren’t capable of learning to hike up hillsides while avoiding fallen tree branches — state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms can accomplish that much. The trouble lies in their lack of generalizability: AI-driven robots often struggle in environments they haven’t seen before. Researchers at the University of Colorado recently proposed a solution in a paper (“Virtual-to-Real-World Transfer Learning for Robots on Wilderness Trails“) published on the preprint server Arxiv.org. Their approach leverages a variety of deep learning models — i.e., layers of neuron-simulating mathematical functions — to help robots figure out the direction of hiking trails from camera footage. “Robots hold promise in many scenarios involving outdoor use, such as … [Read more...] about AI system teaches robots how to navigate wilderness trails